Motorcyclist Caselli killed in Baja 1000

International motorcycle champion Kurt Caselli was killed late Friday afternoon while leading the Baja 1000 off-road race.

Caselli, 30, apparently lost control of his KTM in a remote, high-speed section of the course and crashed 90 miles from the Ensenada, Baja California, finish of the 883-mile finale to the SCORE off-road season.

Caselli crashed around 4:30 p.m. Friday and apparently died while being transported to a hospital in Ensenada. The first racers to reach Caselli said it was a racing accident and was not connected to a booby trap on the course or the approaching nightfall.

“Even though the news didn’t come out until night time, the accident happened while there was still daylight,” Kawasaki racer Taylor Robert said on Facebook Saturday. Robert said the accident happened in a secluded section of the course.

Caselli was leading the 46th annual race at the time of the fatal accident. He was one of four riders on the factory-backed KTM team

A resident of Palmdale, Caselli was an international figure in off-road and endurance motorcycle racing as well as an emerging rally racer.

Caselli recently won his third straight National Hare-And-Hound championship. He was also the World Off-Road Series champion in 2007, 2010 and 2011 and was named the American Motorcyclist’s Association’s Sportsman of the Year in 2007.

In June, Caselli won the Desafio Ruta 40 Rally in Argentina. He made his rally debut last winter by winning two stages of the Dakar Rally. He was also a multi-time gold medalist in the International Six Day event that is both a test of speed and technical skills around obstacle courses.

The Honda team of Colton Udall, Tim Weigand, David Kamo and Mark Samuels were the overall motorcycle winners with a time of 18 hours, 29 minutes and 14 seconds. Four wheel vehicles were finishing Saturday.